MFS -The Other News - What the main papers don't say.

                    Morning Posting.

• Updated !Earthquakes in the last 24 hours in the world seismic activity situation Greece 5.3 - 5.2 ; Indonesia 5.2 !More info here.

• President Obama: I Want Second Term 'Badly'.(Abc).By Devin Dwyer.President Barack Obama today signaled an aggressive tact for his early re-election campaign, critiquing his Republican opponents by name and insisting he's ready to "fight with every fiber of my being" for a second term."How much do you want it?" ABC News' Diane Sawyer asked Obama during an exclusive interview in Las Vegas."Badly," the president said, "because I think the country needs it." "Whoever wins the Republican primary is going to be a standard bearer for a vision of the country that I don't think reflects who we are," Obama said."I'm going to fight as hard as I can with every fiber of my being to make sure that we continue on a path that I think will restore the American dream," he said.Obama pushed back against what he called Republicans' "rhetorical flourishes," including Newt Gingrich's oft-repeated contention that Obama is the "food stamp president."Hmmm......."Dictatorship naturally arises out of democracy, and the most aggravated form of tyranny and slavery out of the most extreme liberty". ~ Plato.Read the full story here.

• Ayatollah orders terrorist Attacks; Colleague of man given the order Visited recently the White House.(BN).The recent assassination of one of Iran's nuclear scientists has apparently prompted the Ayatollah to dispatch Hezbollah to commit terror attacks through the head of the Al Quds Brigade. That man's name is Gen. Qasem Soleimani. That name is made more relevant by the fact that a close associate of Soleimani was recently given the red carpet treatment by the White House.Al Ameri holds the Iranian nationality under the name of Hassan Ameri and his wife is Iranian. He usually visits Iran and meets with Qassem Sulaimani, the head of Al Quds Brigade, under the Iranian guard forces, on a regular basis.While being in Iran, Al Ameri played a role in torturing the Iraqi prisoners, who were captured by Iran during the Iraqi-Iranian war. Prisoners who returned from there accuse him of being the cruelest against them. This role helped him to reach the status that he occupies in the eyes of the Iranians.Hmmmmm.....Obama's 'guest'?Read the full story here.

• Obama Can’t Handle the Truth (Just Ask Gov. Brewer).(BigGovernment).By AWR Hawkins.President Barack Obama has a problem, a problem much bigger than his plummeting poll numbers among black voters, the ever-worsening housing market, or the chronically high national unemployment numbers. Although these are all bad and must be weighing down on him—whether he admits it or not—they are minor compared to his deeper problem, which is his inability to handle criticism, his inability to handle the truth.We first saw this when Obama was starting to run for president and he put reporters “on notice” regarding comments about the size of his ears. Since then we’ve seen it in the way he locks out reporters who ask hard questions and, most recently, in the way he appears to have lodged a complaint with Gov. Jan Brewer regarding her criticism of the way he has gone to war with Arizona to keep that state from defending its southern border.If you’ll recall, in December 2006, after New York Times’ reporter Maureen Dowd had written about how Obama’s “ears stick out,” Obama tracked her down at a speaking engagement and said: “I just want to put you on notice. I’m very sensitive,” adding, “I was teased relentlessly when I was a kid about my big ears.” (Rush Limbaugh was then criticized for seizing on that comment and warning people that it demonstrated Obama’s skin was too thin for the rigors of the presidency. And in retrospect, Limbaugh was right.)Perhaps you remember the April 2011 exchange that took place between Obama and Dallas news reporter Brad Watson, during an interview wherein Watson asked the president pointed, probing questions instead of the kind of light and fluffy stuff a CNN reporter asks when he or she gets the chance. For example, as the two sat face to face, Watson looked right at Obama and asked: “Why do you think you’re so unpopular in Texas?” And when Obama tried to make it look like he wasn’t that unpopular in Texas, saying he’d only lost in 2008 by a “few percentage points,” Watson countered: “Well, you lost by about 10%. 55 to 44.” And because Obama can’t handle criticism, he became noticeably bothered as the questions continued. When the short interview was over, an angry Obama whispered to Watson: “Let me finish my answers next time we do an interview.”Of course Watson won’t get another interview, because Obama locks reporters out if they dare take him to task. As Keith Koffler wrote of Obama’s reaction to Watson back in April, “Look how thin-skinned he can be.”Speaking of thin-skinned, that’s the exact phrase Gov. Brewer used to describe Obama after he walked across the tarmac in Phoenix on Wednesday and greeted Brewer not with “hello” or “good to see you,” but with a complaint about how she’d described his efforts to deep-end Arizona’s S.B. 1070. He said he’d read the complaint in a passage from her book, “Scorpions for Breakfast.”There Brewer wrote:  [Obama] has repeatedly made fun of those of us who want to see the law enforced, saying we want a ‘moat’ with ‘alligators’ in it around our country. The reason he has resorted to these failed attempts at humor, I think, is that he supports a policy that is fundamentally undemocratic, and he knows it.Said Brewer of the exchange: “He brought up my book and he was a little tense. He said he read the excerpt and didn’t think I was very cordial. I said we’d have to agree to disagree. He was a little thin-skinned and tense, to say the least.”The bottom line: Obama can’t handle criticism. Obama can’t handle the truth. Dowd proved it in 2006, Watson proved in 2011, and Gov. Brewer proved it again two days ago.Read the full story here.

• Obama in SOTU: Cut the Taxes that Pay for Social Security, but Don’t Threaten Social Security.(BigGovernment).By Charles C. Johnson.Last night President Obama renewed his calls for a so-called “middle class tax” cut that would all but kill Social Security:“Right now, our most immediate priority is stopping a tax hike on 160 million working Americans while the recovery is still fragile. People cannot afford losing $40 out of each paycheck this year. There are plenty of ways to get this done. So let’s agree right here, right now: No side issues. No drama. Pass the payroll tax cut without delay.”And yet only two paragraphs later, he said this: Alas, in calling for a renewed payroll tax holiday, President Obama continues to raid Social Security and imperil the retirement account that many Americans have paid into and continue to depend upon.On the one hand, he raids the Social Security trust fund, while on the other he attacks Republicans for threatening Social Security. Republicans ought not let him get away with such transparent chutzpah.As I wrote for Engage America, this is a big mistake and potentially a catastrophic one for America’s largest entitlement program. Indeed, put yourself in the position of those “innocent Americans” and law abiding Americans–Generation X, who will grow old just as Social Security goes belly up.Read the full story here.

• Jon Stewart Forces Secretary Sebelius to Sweat Obamacare’s Details.(Heritage).Monday on The Daily Show, comedian Jon Stewart interviewed Health and Human Services (HHS) Secretary Kathleen Sebelius. The Secretary didn’t escape the hot seat in what turned out to be an interesting discussion regarding the implementation of Obamacare.One notable topic covered during the interview was the surprise proposal by HHS to let states determine their own definitions of “essential health benefits.” Obamacare explicitly instructs HHS to fill in the details of the legislation’s mandatory minimum benefit package, but as the Galen Institute’s John Hoff previously noted in a Heritage writing, “Although HHS can, of course, produce a piece of paper (or, more likely, hundreds of pages of regulation) purporting to define the term, in reality this will not provide the real-world uniformity of coverage contemplated by [Obamacare]. HHS has an impossible task.”It seems HHS agrees that it has an impossible task and is now looking for a way to stick somebody else with the problem. Sebelius claims that letting states define benefits will give them flexibility. But in reality, all that would do is intensify the existing special-interest lobbying in state capitols for more mandated health insurance coverage—driving the cost of coverage under Obamacare even higher.In a second installment, Stewart questioned Sebelius about whether or not employers would be inclined to “dump” their employees in the new health care exchanges and pay the new penalty instead. “Is the penalty more than the [cost of] insurance?” Stewart asked. Sebelius responded, “The penalty will help pay for the tax credit that the employee will get in the insurance.” Extensive research does a better job of answering the question. The cost of the new Obamacare subsidies will not be covered by the fines collected from employer penalties. The facts show that some employers will be able to come out ahead even after paying the penalty and increasing workers’ cash compensation to make up for the lost health benefits.Stewart then posed this question:Do you think ultimately this is, a bunch of people dump to the exchange, and it becomes sort of a back door, of government, not a takeover necessarily, but of a government responsibility for the health care, employees, and it decouples it—I’m not saying that’s a bad thing—but decouples it from employment, and people will get it through the government—through tax credits, rather than through their employers—and then suddenly, obviously then, we’re Sweden. Do you think that’s the case?Well, Jon, America may not be Sweden yet, but it’s getting a lot closer under Obamacare.Read the full story here.

• Capitol Hill Chevy Volt Hearing: What About All the Other Fires?(BigGovernment).I attended Wednesday’s 8:00am (8am?!?) House Oversight and Government Reform Committee hearing entitled: Volt Vehicle Fire: What Did NHTSA Know And When Did They Know It?The witnesses were killer: National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA), Barack Obama-appointee Administrator David Strickland.And General Motors (GM), Barack Obama-appointee CEO Dan Akerson.The scope of the hearing was a bit too narrow – leaving out some fairly important attending facts. Like, say, the (at least) five other Chevy Volt fires that have occurred besides the one being discussed.This hearing was all about a single June Volt blaze. The battery burst into flames about three weeks after a test crash at and by the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration (NHTSA).A fire about which Obama’s NHTSA did tell the Obama White House.But a fire about which neither Obama’s NHTSA, the Obama Administration nor Obama’s GM told the American people for nearly six months – and then did so only when forced by a looming Bloomberg news story.But: The White House had no role in the decision to delay disclosure of a fire that broke out in a crash-tested Chevrolet Volt, the Obama administration told Congress on Friday.Of COURSE not.Hmmmm.....My guess dealers their fire insurance went up quite a bit.Read the full story here.

• "Another one bites the dust" - Another Stimulus-Backed Energy Company Files for Bankruptcy.(Heritage).After months of financial turmoil, an Energy Department-backed lithium ion battery company has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. The company, Ener1, received a $118 million grant from DOE in 2010 as part of the president’s stimulus package. The money, which went to Ener1 subsidiary EnerDel, aimed to promote renewable energy storage battery technology for electrical grid use.But despite generous federal support for the company, Ener1 was racked by problems last year. In October, NASDAQ delisted the company due to non-compliance with Securities and Exchange Commission filing requirements. A month later, the company’s president, chief executive, and top financial officer were fired.On Thursday, Ener1 announced it will initiate a pre-packaged Chapter 11 bankruptcy plan as part of an agreement to restructure the company’s debt obligations.Hmmmm........Obama: "All the Choices We've Made Have Been the Right Ones".Read the full story here.

• Israeli Defense minister Barak: Iran 'drifting' toward nuke goal line.(YNet).Defense Minister Ehud Barak said Friday the world must quickly stop Iran from reaching the point where even a "surgical" military strike could not block it from obtaining nuclear weapons.Amid fears that Israel is nearing a decision to attack Iran's nuclear program, Barak said tougher international sanctions are needed against Tehran's oil and banks so that "we all will know early enough whether the Iranians are ready to give up their nuclear weapons program." Iran insists its atomic program is only aimed at producing energy and research, but has repeatedly refused to consider giving up its ability to enrich uranium. "We are determined to prevent Iran from turning nuclear. And even the American president and opinion leaders have said that no option should be removed from the table and Iran should be blocked from turning nuclear," Barak told reporters during the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum. "It seems to us to be urgent, because the Iranians are deliberately drifting into what we call an immunity zone where practically no surgical operation could block them," he said. Barak called it "a challenge for the whole world" to prevent a nuclear-armed Iran but stopped short of confirming any action that could further stoke Washington's concern about a possible Israeli military strike.IAEA chief Yukiya Amano said at a Davos session that "we do not have that much confidence if Iran has declared everything" and its best information "indicates that Iran has engaged in activities relevant to nuclear explosive devices." "For now they do not have the capacity to manufacture the fuel," he said. "But in the future, we don't know." Read the full story here.

• Pentagon taps students to build robots, and death dealing drones.(StratRisks).With an eye toward revolutionizing how defense systems and vehicles are made, the Pentagon has tapped a team of Bay Area-based scientists, engineers and hackers to create a program that will enlist California high school students to build robots, drones and other low- and medium-tech gadgets.The Defense Department’s Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA, has awarded $2 million of a $10 million program to two outfits that have joined forces to develop a pilot project in 10 schools.Part of the agency’s lauded Adaptive Vehicle Make program, which has employed university-based teams to build new navigation systems, the latest effort wants to cut down on manufacturing time. Dubbed Manufacturing Experimentation and Outreach, the program hopes to develop and motivate the next generation of chic geeks to collaborate through social networks to design and develop new vehicles.The overall goal is to expand to 1,000 high schools, both in and out of the country, said Dale Dougherty, founder of MAKE magazine and one of the directors of the pilot program, along with Saul Griffith of San Francisco-based design team Otherlab.The team has two years to reach the initial goal of 10 schools, then two more years to expand first to 100 schools then 1,000. The Defense Department wants unlimited rights to everything the students build, including all algorithms, source code, equipment and test use cases.Hmmmm.....Am i the only one who has 'moral objections' to this?Why not use the creativity of the youth for something constructive?Read the full story here.

• Twitter to restrict user content in some countries.(Reuters).Twitter announced Thursday that it would begin restricting Tweets in certain countries, marking a policy shift for the social media platform that helped propel the popular uprisings recently sweeping across the Middle East."As we continue to grow internationally, we will enter countries that have different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression," Twitter wrote in a blog post published Thursday.It said even with the possibility of such restrictions, Twitter would not be able to coexist with some countries. "Some differ so much from our ideas that we will not be able to exist there," it said.Twitter gave as examples of restrictions it might cooperate with "certain types of content, such as France or Germany, which ban pro-Nazi content."A Twitter spokeswoman declined to elaborate on the blog."Starting today, we give ourselves the ability to reactively withhold content from users in a specific country while keeping it available in the rest of the world," the Twitter blog said."Starting today, we give ourselves the ability to reactively withhold content from users in a specific country while keeping it available in the rest of the world," the Twitter blog said.Twitter's decision to begin censoring content represents a significant departure from its policy just one year ago, when anti-government protesters in Tunisia, Egypt and other Arab countries coordinated mass demonstrations through on the social network and, in the process, thrust Twitter's disruptive potential into the global spotlight.Hmmmm.....The fact that Prince Alwaleed unveiled a $300 million stake purchase in fast-growing microblogging site Twitter has nothing to do with 'oppressing free speech?Read the full story here.

• 'Iran could ban EU oil exports next week'.(JPost).TEHRAN - A law to be debated in Iran's parliament on Sunday could halt exports of oil to the European Union as early as next week, the semi-official Fars news agency quoted a lawmaker as saying on Friday."On Sunday, parliament will have to approve a 'double emergency' bill calling for a halt in the export of Iranian oil to Europe starting next week," Hossein Ibrahimi, vice-chairman of the Iranian parliament's national security and foreign policy committee, was quoted as saying.The Iranian parliament is pushing for the export ban to deny the EU a 6-month phase-in of the embargo on Iranian oil that the bloc agreed on Monday as part of a raft of tough new Western sanctions aimed at forcing Iran to curb its nuclear program."If the deputies arrive at the conclusion that the Iranian oil exports to Europe must be halted, the parliament will not delay a moment (in passing the bill)," Fars quoted Moayed Hosseini-Sadr, a member of parliament's energy committee, as saying.Read the full story here.

• Turkey to become first Muslim nation to show Holocaust film.(HurriyetDaily).Turkish public television (TRT) was set to show an epic French documentary about the Holocaust last night in the first broadcast of its kind by national media in a Muslim state. A spokesman for TRT said the 1985 film “Shoah” would be shown on one of the network’s 14 channels.The director of the nine-hour-plus documentary, Claude Lanzmann, called the Turkish move historic.“We should acknowledge the courage and determination of the Turks,” said Lanzmann, who spent 11 years working on the documentary. “Turkey is a country people don’t know and understand very badly.”Turkey’s broadcast of the film is the culmination of work by the Aladdin Project, a Paris-based group which tries to improve Jewish-Muslim relations. The group said in a statement that it had never before been shown in its entirely in a Muslim country.Consisting largely of Holocaust-survivor interviews, the film examines the killing of European Jews in Nazi death camps during World War II.The broadcast comes at a sensitive time in Turkey’s international relations.Hmmmm.......How many will actually watch?Read the full story here.

• Muslim Brotherhood Guide: Parliament has right to hold military accountable.(BM).CAIRO: The head of Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood Supreme Guide Mohammed Badie, said in statements on Thursday, that the newly elected parliament has the right to hold all state institutions, particularly the military, accountable and that any organization “cannot be above the rule of the people and the parliament can determine the budget of the military by creating a special committee.”Badie said the Muslim Brotherhood, which now holds 45 percent of the parliament`s seats, “will not nominate one of its members in the presidential elections,” and would not get behind Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh, or any candidate with an Islamic reference in the elections, but that it would participate with “all national forces in the selection of a candidate that enjoys consensus on the basis of the rules does not favor anyone and define the specifications of the next Egyptian president according to what`s best for Egypt interests.”Badie stressed in statements to reporters on Thursday that the demands of the Egyptian people “is a top priority for the group to restore all fundamental rights of people, and the preservation of freedom and dignity, and social justice, and provide a decent living for every citizen,” stressing that democratic transition is the “only way for the return of the rights of the Egyptian people and dignity.”The Brotherhood chief said that the position of the Muslim Brotherhood towards the military council is one of “a partner in the protection of the revolution, where if it made mistakes … it should be held accountable and if it does well, it has to be praised without undermining the prestige of the Egyptian People’s Army.”Speaking about the defection of a number of young Muslim Brotherhood members recently, he said that what the group witnessed recently were differences and the rejection of youth and leaders to commit to the decisions of the Shura Council of the Brotherhood, “is evidence of the vitality and democracy,” pointing out that the Muslim Brotherhood, “is an institutional group and whoever violates the regulations, has to be subjected to a decision by the institution.”Hmmmmm........"You don't leave the mob"?Read the full story here.

• Hamas quietly quits Syria as violence continues.(AlArabiya).The leader of the Palestinian Islamist movement Hamas, Khaled Meshaal, has effectively abandoned his headquarters in the Syrian capital, Damascus, diplomatic and intelligence sources said on Friday.“Meshaal is not staying in Syria as he used to do. He is almost out all the time,” said a diplomat in the region who spoke on condition on anonymity.A regional intelligence source, who also did not wish to be identified, said: “He’s not going back to Syria. That’s the decision he’s made. There’s still a Hamas presence there, but it’s insignificant.”Damascus is isolated following a bloody, 10-month uprising against the rule of President Bashar al-Assad and is not secure, the diplomat said, adding that Meshaal was no longer able to receive international visitors there.Analysts say Meshaal was also embarrassed by Assad’s violent crackdown, with more than 5,000 people reported killed. Many victims of the security forces have been Sunni Muslims allied to the Muslim Brotherhood, whose support Meshaal relies on.Assad is backed mainly by his minority Alawite sect and other minorities.The sources said Meshaal would not publicly shut down the political headquarters of Hamas in Syria, where it has long been hosted by Assad and by his father before him.“In the past month he may have only stayed five days in Syria and the rest he spent in Qatar, Turkey and Egypt,” said the diplomat. “But he did not close the headquarters in Syria in full and there are some Hamas officials still there.”The sources said Meshaal was currently in Egypt. But “there was no agreement to open an office in Cairo. Not yet,” said the diplomat. “The expected residence for Meshaal is Qatar where he may stay most of the time until the Syria smoke has cleared.”Qatar is the Arab world’s most outspoken critic of Assad. Qatari mediation was helpful in arranging Meshaal’s upcoming visit to Jordan next week, restoring ties with the monarchy more than a decade after Hamas was ejected from the kingdom.Hamas Gaza Strip leader Ismail Haniyeh was thought to have “received promises from Turkey to provide the movement and his administration with $300 million a year to help Gaza”.Turkey is also a strong critic of the crackdown by Assad in its southern neighbor, Syria. Haniyeh is scheduled to travel to Iran in the coming days.Hmmmm.........Muslim Brotherhood Egypt.....Turkey....Quatar.....Shaikh Yousef al-Qaradawi.Read the full story here.

• Car bomb attack outside Baghdad hospital kills 28: medics.(AlArabiya).At least 28 people were killed and 50 others wounded when a bomb exploded near a Baghdad marketplace on Friday in the latest attack on a mainly Shi’ite neighborhood since a political crisis erupted in December, police and hospital sources said.An interior ministry official confirmed the explosion in Zafraniyah, which struck at 11:00 am (08:00 GMT), but said it was caused by a suicide attacker driving an explosives-packed car.The blast hit the funeral procession of Mohammed al-Maliki, a real estate agent who was killed along with his wife and son a day earlier in the west Baghdad neighborhood of Yarmuk, the doctor and interior ministry official said. Both spoke on condition of anonymity.The procession had collected Maliki’s body and was transporting it for the funeral when the explosion struck.A medical official said at least four women were among the fatalities, but no further details were immediately available.Maliki and his family were killed by gunmen in Yarmuk, although there have been differing accounts of the attack itself.A medic at Yarmuk hospital said the attackers burst into a real estate agency and killed three, while an interior ministry official said four people, including two real estate agents, died when gunmen opened fire on their car.Friday’s attack came a day after violence in Iraq killed 17 people, and is the deadliest to hit the country in nearly two weeks, amid a political crisis pitting the Shiite-led government against the main Sunni-backed bloc that has stoked sectarian tensions.The row erupted when authorities charged Sunni Arab Vice President Tareq al-Hashemi with running a death squad and Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, a Shiite, called for his Sunni deputy Saleh al-Mutlak to be sacked after the latter said the premier was “worse than Saddam Hussein”.Hmmmm.......Obama: If We Work Hard, Afghanistan Could Be a Success...Like Iraq!Read the full story here.

• Indonesia's Islamic vigilantes 'turning to terrorism'.(HD).Tolerance of Islamic vigilantism is helping to breed a new generation of terrorists in Indonesia, the International Crisis Group warned in a report Thursday.The report criticised the government and police for lax law enforcement against hardliners, who often claim responsibility for violent anti-vice and sectarian attacks but regularly evade punishment."Indonesia: From Vigilantism to Terrorism in Cirebon" described how a group of poor uneducated men in the western Javanese town went from using sticks and stones in morality raids to using bombs and guns."What we saw in Cirebon was a a group of about 10 people who started out on a path to terrorism by participating in anti-vice campaigns," ICG analyst Sidney Jones told AFP."By using violence in these campaigns, they clearly violated the law but weren't punished." The group went from carrying out anti-vice attacks on TV stations and convenience stores selling alcohol to orchestrating suicide attacks on a police mosque and a church on Java island.The radicalisation of the Cirebon group was fuelled by weekly sermons where spiritual leaders encouraged the bloodshed of Islam's enemies, which have come to include the Indonesian government and police, the report said.Read the full story here.

• Egyptian writer: "Who offends the Prophet is not the West, but we Muslims, for making Islam terrorist".(TJ).Translated from elbashayer.com, 22 December 2011: Who Offends the Prophet?By Ahmad al-Aswani. I don’t believe that cartoons, books, or movies can offend any religion, or affect the faith of those who adhere to that religion with truth and conviction. The ones who offend the Prophet are those who slaughter and blow up innocent people throughout all the world—from New York to Madrid, in London, Bali, Riyadh, Cairo, Kabul, and Baghdad—even now, after mentioning Allah and the Prophet under the banner of Islamic jihad. Protests come out in support of all this, and internet forums sing praises to the knight Usama bin Laden, the hero of the raids of New York and Washington. Who offends the Prophet is a man like al-Qaradawi, who incites people to kill Jewish children in their mothers’ wombs (from an interview with Egyptian journalists in 1996), and incites people to carry out suicide operations. In the name of the religion and the Prophet, he declares jihad in Iraq, and innocent victims are killed.Who offends the Prophet are those who demand that the world issue a decision preventing the disrespect of religions while they practice it themselves in every prayer in their mosques, schools (madrasas), and on their television stations. They especially disrespect Christians and Jews, and curse them in every prayer (after the Islamic bloc offered a decision on this issue in the Human Rights Council in the United Nations, the Saudi Shura Council objected to this decision because insulting other religions is one of the rites of Islam, according to what was published on the Saudi site al-Arabiya).Who offends is ..Continued.....  Read the full story here.

• Bahrain detainee dies in custody, opposition sees torture.(Reuters).Bahrain's police said on Thursday that a man detained over "acts of violence and sabotage" died of a chronic disease in hospital while in custody, but the opposition said he was tortured to death.A police official said the man suffered from sickle-cell disease and died of natural causes, state news agency BNA reported.The main Shi'ite Muslim opposition group, Wefaq, said on its website that the 19-year-old had been injured after being squeezed between two police vehicles as he tried to flee during a protest and that he had been detained and tortured instead of receiving treatment.Amnesty International urged Bahrain on Thursday to investigate its use of tear gas against frequent protests in the Gulf state, citing a Bahraini rights group as saying 13 people had died from its indiscriminate use."The rise in fatalities and eyewitness accounts suggest that tear gas is being used inappropriately by Bahraini security forces, including in people's homes and other confined spaces," said Hassiba Hadj Sahraoui, an Amnesty regional deputy director.Washington, which bases its Fifth Fleet on the Gulf island, has linked a $53 million arms sale to the kingdom's response to the inquiry. Bahrain has said it is implementing the inquiry's recommendations, but the top U.N. human rights official argues that Bahrain is not punishing those who have committed abuses."Given the government of Bahrain's malicious misuse of tear gas, the U.S. government should continue its current policy to not issue new licenses for riot control equipment that have the potential for harmful misuse," Hans Hogrefe, chief policy officer of Physicians for Human Rights, said in a statement.Read the full story here.

• Can there be a second Holocaust?(JPost).By Robert S. Wistrich.In recent years, the Holocaust has been subject to an increasingly sickening blend of ruthless politicization, deliberate distortion, crass commercialization and an often abject sentimentalism.More ominously, it has also become a weapon of choice for many of Israel’s worst enemies and for a resurgent anti-Semitism which brands the entire enterprise of Holocaust memory as nothing but a “Zionist plot.”In contemporary Europe, Holocaust guilt is used more often than not to promote the Palestinian cause rather than to recognize the necessity of having a Jewish state. Arab and Islamist propaganda, aided and abetted by many liberals and leftists (including some vocal Jewish anti- Zionists), hammers away at the grotesque libel that Israeli policies towards the Palestinians are worse than those of the Nazis. Many Europeans believe these fables.In Israel itself, there are even academics who trumpet such absurdities which have become all-too- commonplace on certain campuses abroad, especially in Britain, North America and Scandinavia.Read the full story here.

• Israeli Ships Switch Flags When Sailing thru Suez Canal.(INN).A sharp decline was reported in the number of ships sailing through the Suez Canal under the Israeli flag in 2011, with only seven making the trip, compared to 15 in 2010, according to the Port and Port Website. Total freight tonnage was down 91 percent, from 166,000 tons to 15,000 tons.A senior source in Egyptian shipping said the level of Israeli shipping did not go down but that Israeli ships switch from Israeli flags to international flags for security reasons when making the trip. It was also reported that Wednesday's anniversary of the revolution that ousted former president Hosni Mubarak was marked by record ship traffic and cargo volume on the canal.Hmmmm......Read the full story here.

• Turkey Moves to Deport Armenian Workers after French Vote.(A).BY Nanore Barsoumian.ISTANBUL–Turkey is set to amend a law that aims to rid the country of illegal workers. Many view this move as retaliation against Armenians, in light of the new bill criminalizing Armenian Genocide denial in France.Different estimates in Turkey put the number of Armenian citizens in the country at as low as 10,000 and as high as 100,000. Many of them are women, and they are employed in low-skill jobs.“This country, which Mark Levene called ‘the Genocide zone,’ throughout its history has made it a habit to deport, expel, and relocate innocent people as retaliation and punishment for things they did not do, or have no connection to at all,” human rights advocate Ayse Gunaysu told the Armenian Weekly Editor Khatchig Mouradian.Back in March 2010, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayip Erdogan hinted at retaliation against Armenian migrant workers if Genocide resolutions were passed in foreign parliaments. In a discussion about Genocide resolutions in the U.S. and Sweden, he told the BBC’s Turkish Service that of the 170,000 Armenians living in Turkey, only 70,000 are Turkish citizens. “We are turning a blind eye to the remaining 100,000… Tomorrow, I may tell these 100,000 to go back to their country, if it becomes necessary.”It appears the French bill was the last straw for Erdogan’s government. On Jan. 25, Turkish Foreign Minister Ahmet Davutoglu told reporters that “Turkey’s response to the adoption of the bill had long been decided.”President of the Migrants’ Association for Social Cooperation and Culture Sefika Gurbuz called the law a “threat to Armenians,” reported Bianet.Meanwhile, Gunaysu characterized Turkey’s response a “black comedy.” “The ongoing blackmail and threats against France is itself proof of guilt as well as a manifestation of lack of dignity and self-respect, despite—of course—pathetic demonstrations of national pride,” said Gunaysu.Gunaysu, who is a member of the Committee Against Racism and Discrimination of the Human Rights Association of Turkey, pointed out the country’s history of deporting innocents peoples. In 1915 the Young Turk regime began its systemic deportations of Armenians as a main tool to rid the Eastern provinces of a native population. “They still tell lies that it was because treacherous Armenians, whereas hundreds of thousands of Armenians were not engaged in any political activity whatsoever,” said Gunaysu. Then it was the turn of Turkey’s Kurdish and Greek populations. “The republican period is full of Kurdish deportations, especially in 1938 during and after the Dersim massacres,” she said. “In 1964, the Turkish government expelled 40,000 Anatolian Greeks, forbidding them to bring along any personal belongings over 20 kg and $20, as a retaliation against Greece in connection with the Cyprus issue—a deportation which is still terribly painful in the memories of these people.”Gunaysu added, “The mindset from which this policy of retaliation originates is racist, inhuman, and brutal. The rulers of Turkey have once more proven that [the government] still follows the same path as that of their predecessors back in 1915 and all along the history of the Republic.”Read the full story here.